Posts in 2015
The Pipe Bomb

The pipe bomb will be eight inches in length, two inches in diameter. It will contain shards of broken glass, some nails, a few screws. It will be born after Jimmy Reed has one bad day too many, after Matt Lacey hip-checks him face-first into his locker, after the right lens of Jimmy’s glasses cracks and the frame bends and the air vents scrape his sideways-turned head, drawing blood.

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flash, 2015SLMChris Negron
College Roommate

Dean keeps asking me hypotheticals. Takes swigs of vodka and raises his pool cue for another shot. “How ‘bout you were in a day-old toilet, and shit is all you have to eat. Would you eat it or would you rather die?” I take my turn and tell him if he asks me one more question I will pose my own, and he won't like his choice between death and death.

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flash, 2015SLMDaniel Lassell
The Knife

Many years ago, my wife and I were living in New York City together making landscape drawings. We were squatting in this abandoned apartment, so whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We had a friend who worked at an art house cinema, and she gave us free popcorn—we saw lots of foreign movies and bad student films.

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flash, 2015SLMKaj Tanaka
Five Flash Fictions

Things were almost over between us, but we didn't know that. It was a mild December. You needed help moving your belongings from the dorm to your parents' house for the holidays. We spent a whole half-hour sorting and discarding the minefield of your car.

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Beneath the Skin

She peeled an orange and found an avocado, the sort of week it had been. The feel of buttery green on her tongue failed to be what she needed as she ate it. Between trips to the cleaners, the library, the morgue, she held her hands steady on the wheel— the grip of an adult, certain and not trembling, her gaze definitely not looking left at the swish of angels, their wings like a coat of rain across the grass.

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flash, 2015SLMBeth Konkoski
Taliaferro

No one I know has ever been to Taliaferro County, so I don’t believe it’s real. There is data out that says it has 1,700 or so residents and I’ve never met a single one. The closest I’ve come is I found a couple guys in a bar in Atlanta one night who said they owned a few thousand acres in Taliaferro between the two of them.

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flash, 2015SLMGreg Sullivan
Two Flash Fictions

Smack me with what you know, baby, I’m asking for it. Make those ten dollar words zip like a switch, make that jargon sizzle. Sting me with words you can correctly pronounce so I’ll stop suspecting you don’t know as much as you think you do.

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flash, 2015SLMKelly Magee
Host

They lived in Indiana together in a red, brick house. A famous writer lived there before them and left a signed map of New York City taped over the solid Midwestern writing desk. They wrote in bed, on the second story of the house. They began thousands of stories they never finished, Lucky Dragon, Going to Colorado, a whole host of aborted voyages.

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flash, 2015SLMJulie Babcock
Eighth Grade Bio

When the caterpillar is crawling in the dish, do not measure it with your ruler. Do not classify it according to the phases of growth illustrated in the chart in your book. These were the things of seventh grade. Now you are in eight grade and must interact with the caterpillar on a new level.

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flash, 2015SLMNina Alvarez
Linda

Outside was a man {had she seen him before?}. A non-descript man. He could have been any man. When she answered the door, it was about three seconds before he threw a vile lie in her face {a vial of lye}.

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flash, 2015SLMJesi Bender